Detail of a Black Seminole warrrior from en engraving depicting the rescue of Duncan McKrimmon,
a well-known event from the First Seminole War. Florida Photographic
Collection.

Sidetrack:
Standard misrepresentations of the war in contemporary historyBack
to main trail

Consider this typical reference, from The Encyclopedia Americana:

"Continued attacks on the Georgia frontier by Seminole Indians and runaway slaves based in Florida led to Jackson's recall to active service in December 1817. He pursued the retreating foe into Spanish Florida...."

Or this, from World Book Online:

"Fierce Seminole Indians, some discontented Creek, and groups of escaped slaves and vagabonds had been raiding American settlements north of the Florida-Georgia border. Jackson defeated the Seminole and pursued them into northwest Florida."

The descriptions place the onus of violence clearly on the blacks and Indians. Reading such history, one would hardly think that Jackson and other slaveholders felt threatened by the communities of free blacks, or that the war resulted from Jackson's massacre of blacks at the Negro Fort. Note how the threat of slave revolt has also vanished from history, even though it had been
the principal note in Jackson's letters to the Spanish and other military commanders in planning the war.
The threat to the institution of slavery, after all, had been
Jackson's main point of protest when he warned the Spanish in 1816 that:

"Secret practices to inveigle Negroes from citizens of Georgia, as well as from the Cherokee and Creek nations of Indians, are still continued by this banditti and the hostile Creeks. This is a state of things which cannot fail to produce much injury to the neighboring settlements, and excite Irritations which eventually may endanger the peace of the
Nation...."